THE PEOPLES' PORTRAIT

- A Global Networked Public Art Project

- Zhang Ga

2006 Installation: Adelaide (AU), Beijing( CN), Linz (AT), New York (US), Seoul (KR)
3.7.2006 - 3.30.2006

2004 Installation: New York (US), Singapore (SG), Linz (AT), Rotterdam (NL), Brisbane (AU)
10.27.2004 - 12.31.2004

#total images 47000+

On March 3rd 2006, once again, the Peoples' Portrait, a global networked public art project that spans across the continents, will be featured as a cornerstone project to light up the opening night of one of the world's premier art festivals, the Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts in Australia. Thousands of miles away, Beijing, Linz, London, Seoul, and New York City will resonate in tandem to create a global picture of peoples' portraits.

"Peoples' Portrait" first debuted in October 2004 simultaneously in nodes around the world during Singapore's SENI Art and the Contemporary Festival in collaboration with Multimedia Art Asia Pacific and the Dutch Electronic Art Festival 2004. SENI and DEAF04 commissioned Zhang Ga's global networked portrait. Over 26,000 people from around the world participated in this project in 2004.

"Peoples' Portrait" utilizes the internet as the underlying mechanism to create a global portrait of people rendered in real time and displayed instantly and simultaneously throughout its global nodes. At each location, photo kiosks are installed to allow people to take their own portraits. Each kiosk consists of a camera that allows passersby to take snapshots; these snapshots are transmitted via the internet to an image database on a central server. Every few seconds, the video walls in different locations retrieve from the same server the peoples' portraits and display them first in time-stamped order, and then randomly from the archive.

Because of the simultaneity and instantaneity of the network, those freshly taken portraits from various locales in the world are shown immediately and sometimes juxtaposed in subtle zooming transitions. For example, as a viewer in New York City watches a picture of himself/herself displayed, another portrait from Seoul follows subsequently; or as a viewer in Adelaide sees a portrait from London, one from Beijing takes over in the next few seconds. Time and space collapse in this transcendent moment.

That the display of the portraits are rendered on colossal video walls in public spaces not only viscerally empowers ordinary people of all walks of life but also symbolically connects men and women of different races and cultures. Here the interactivity lies not in the playfulness of a game console; but rather, in the global repercussions triggered by a simple click of a button, which evokes a solemn moment of elevation of subjectivity hitherto unimaginable.

As the artist's continued search for a visual language and cultural metaphor in the age of internet and globalization, this project actively investigates the aesthetics of portraiture in the context of speed and scale. How would a public, fluctuating environment dramatically alter our notion of portraiture as the depiction of a fixed moment in a private arena? How would the "drawing out of a personality" magnified at such a scale affect the very nature of portraiture? How would a work of art in the age of internet regain an aura that once faded owing to mechanical "re-produceablity"? And how would data bytes and transmission speeds behave as substitutions for brush and paint to realize a pictorial space?

To answer these questions, the artist utilizes network and communication infrastructure as the underlying mechanism of the image making process to create a collective and instantaneous portrait at a global scale with unprecedented effect, therefore opening up a new discourse for the art of portraiture and challenging visual perception at large. In bringing about a self-endorsed, powerful and uplifting impact realized through technologically produced artifacts in relation to the dynamics of virtuality and reality, speed and time, local and trans-local, the artist also questions the notion of interaction and authorship and expresses a humanist concern in the age of technological supremacy.

For the 2004 installation, the project was materialized both on large public video walls and web sites. The Whitney Museum of American Art's portal to Internet art, artport, and the Media Center for Art and Design in Barcelona were the web portals for this project. It was also presented as a special project of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria. All nodes drew images from the same source: the web server situated at Parsons School of Design in New York City into which portrait images were uploaded and stored. Five photo-capturing kiosks were set up around the world in conjunction with public video walls and large scale projections in Times Square, on the world's largest digital display system at the Reuters North American Headquarters in New York City; in the Central Business District of Singapore; in Rotterdam's Central Library, the Netherlands; in the QUT Cultural Center, Brisbane, Australia; and at Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria during the MAAP in Singapore Festival from October 27th to November 28th 2004 and the Dutch Electronic Art Festival 2004 from November 9th to November 21st 2004